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HALIFAX—The failure of one of Sydney’s largest employers set a Dickensian scene last December — hundreds laid off and stiffed out of pay just a few weeks before Christmas — but when a new owner swept in, the outlook quickly changed.

In the days after buying the bankrupt ServiCom Call Centre in a court auction and visiting Cape Breton for the first time, Anthony Marlowe relayed a message to its former employees: “We’re proud to be part of your family and thank you very much for the classiest of warm welcomes.”

Anthony Marlowe, new owner of the Sydney Call Centre Inc., spoke to employees at a ribbon-cutting event on Jan. 18, 2019 in Sydney, N.S. Marlowe told the hundreds gathered at the event that he would meet them all at the local legion after — and the tab was on him. (Haley Ryan / The Star Halifax)

During a phone interview from Iowa about six weeks later, he told the Star that he continued to have the best interests of those employees at heart.

“We have plans to do nothing but to treat everyone well and right,” Marlowe said, with the voice of his GPS in the background telling him to take a U-turn. He gave the interview from his car in between other meetings.

Marlowe has been hailed as a saviour in the Sydney community for returning several hundred people to work — a reputation he’s graciously accepted — but as the plaudits of his good deed fade, he’s anticipating his business will grow. Cape Bretoners have pinned their hopes on it.

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More than 600 people were suddenly unemployed when the ServiCom Call Centre announced Dec. 6 it was boarding up shop. It had been a fixture in the Cape Breton community for almost 20 years, and employees said they were blindsided by the closure.

The writing was on the wall — the call centre’s American parent company, JNET Communications, had filed for bankruptcy protection in October, and paycheques were delayed for weeks — but Canadian employees were given reassurances. Some were expecting bonuses, not pink slips.

When the shutdown came, people started scrambling. The public opened their pocket books and donated to local charities, which in turn handed out groceries and paid for heating oil and electrical bills. At the same time, an auction opened on the call centre’s remaining assets.

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Three bidders jockeyed for the rights to the call centre’s contracts — an apparently lucrative opportunity that retained its sheen while the rest of JNET’s American operations tarnished — but it was the founder and CEO of Marlowe Companies Inc. (MCI) who won it for $1.5 million.

“I was fairly confident we were going to be victorious,” Marlowe told the Star.

The day after the auction, he went to the nearest airport and flew to Nova Scotia for the first time, where hundreds of workers waited eagerly to meet the man who said he would give them back their jobs.

Marlowe renamed the operation The Sydney Call Centre Inc. and dressed it with a new logo, which features the austere face of a bald eagle staring out from a round, yellow frame.

The bird is a long-standing symbol of both Cape Breton and America — idealizing a proud islander culture and a zeal for freedom, respectively — but the connections between the two places don’t end there.

Employees at the Sydney Call Centre welcomed new owner Anthony Marlowe at a ribbon-cutting ceremony in January. Marlowe rehired almost 500 workers who were laid off by the previous owner in December. (Haley Ryan/The Star Halifax)

American interest in the island was piqued in 2016 when a tongue-in-cheek campaign invited Donald Trump objectors to immigrate to Cape Breton, should the business mogul win the presidency. Marlowe said he does not fall in that camp — he voted for the current president — but he did see a major business opportunity.

“It’s very difficult to describe the community sentiment” that exists in Cape Breton, Marlowe told the Star. “It’s something that we’re proud to be a part of, in a community that we’re privileged to have been welcomed to with open arms.”

But he’s benefitted from more than hospitality.

Of MCI’s nine call centres — the rest of which are scattered around six American states — the Sydney Call Centre is currently the largest. According to Marlowe, it stands to be the most profitable.

After almost a month of inactivity, the call centre reopened on Jan. 2. In its first month, it brought in more than $1 million in revenue, Marlowe said. The sum didn’t match prebankruptcy benchmarks, he said, but he still considered the results “unbelievable.”

Marlowe has been in the telemarketing industry for more than 20 years. He started on the phones at a call centre in Iowa City when he was a teenager and a college student.

“I wasn’t very good at it for a couple, three weeks,” he said, modestly, then added that once he “figured it out” he became one of the best at the company.

The company was MCI — another MCI, not to be confused with the namesake enterprise Marlowe founded in 2015. Microwave Communications Inc. was founded in the 1960s and by the time it hired Marlowe in the late 1990s it was a major player in international telecommunications.

According to media reports from 1998, WorldCom bought the old MCI in a massive corporate merger worth $37 billion. By 2002, a major accounting scandal had come to light and ultimately led to WorldCom’s bankruptcy, putting Marlowe out of a job.

That experience gave him “some extra sympathy for the workers of ServiCom,” he said.

Without a saviour waiting in the wings, Marlowe used his layoff as an opportunity to become an entrepreneur.

He had dropped out of college when it became apparent that he had a knack for sales and telecommunications, and by the time most of his former classmates would have been graduating, he had started up his first venture: a call centre under the company name TMone.

Sixteen years on, the 39-year-old Marlowe is at the helm of MCI and its four subsidiaries, employing more than 2,000 people, including his new batch of Canadian workers.

“The workforce in Sydney is probably the biggest asset this organization has,” George Karaphillis, dean of the Shannon School of Business at Cape Breton University, said in an interview.

He said jobs at the call centre — despite most of them offering little more than minimum wage — are plum gigs. Ninety-three per cent of ServiCom workers returned to the call centre under its new ownership.

“They’re not the best jobs, but they’re good jobs,” said Karaphillis, making note of the health benefits and safe working conditions. “We don’t have that many of those lying around.”

He estimates that the call centre is Sydney’s third largest employer, after the school board and the health authority.

According to the Finance and Treasury Board of Nova Scotia, 15.1 per cent of Cape Breton’s labour force was unemployed in December 2018 when the ServiCom workers joined the pool. That rate is eight per cent higher than the provincial average, and almost 10 per cent higher than the national average.

Statistics Canada figures show that even as unemployment rates have dropped in most of the country over the past five years, they’ve held steadily around 15 per cent in Cape Breton.

The whole community has a vested interest in the success of such a major employer, Karaphillis said. Especially considering Cape Breton’s unemployment rate, any individual or corporation that can secure several hundred jobs is guaranteed to win loyalty and acclaim.

Of course, the business professor noted, local ownership would be better for the resiliency of the Cape Breton economy, but that’s a philosophical ideal and remains evasive. The community’s immediate welfare trumps all else, he said.

With those circumstances, Marlowe’s revival of the operation appeared to be a heroic act. From a business perspective, it was simply shrewd.

The bidding war over the ServiCom assets was, in and of itself, “a good sign,” said Karaphillis. Add to that an eager and capable workforce standing at the ready and a precedent of government incentives for the operation. (Marlowe secured an agreement with the province for a $2.4-million payroll rebate at the start of February.)

MCI’s American status was an advantage, too.

“It’s a windfall that the Canadian dollar is so favourable,” said Karaphillis.

There may have been a diplomatic chill between Canada and the U.S. in 2018, with international business relationships coming under scrutiny during NAFTA negotiations, but Marlowe said that was only a fleeting consideration in his purchase.

The new USMCA agreement, which took the place of NAFTA, has a chapter on telecommunications — but after a “cursory review,” Marlowe said, “there was nothing that stood out at us that was either good or bad about how it would impact our industry.”

Anthony Marlowe, new owner of the Sydney Call Centre and a self-professed Donald Trump supporter, shared a photo of himself with the president on his public Instagram account the day after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. (Instagram)

And despite his country’s president regularly chiding and threatening Canada in the months leading up to the USMCA signing, Marlowe said his business remains apolitical, even if he personally is not.

The day after the 2016 presidential election, Marlowe posted a photo to his public Instagram account of him standing with Trump, both sporting large grins, Trump giving a thumbs up. In a February 2018 MCI release and again in his interview with the Star, Marlowe highlighted the fact that MCI was contracted to do phone banking for the Trump presidential campaign.

MCI made 79 million calls on behalf of the campaign, evidence of a legitimate election, Marlowe said. Its legitimacy has been questioned over claims of Russian interference.

Marlowe said he’s aware of how polarizing Trump is — Canadians largely disapprove of him — but he thinks Cape Bretoners may differ.

“Frankly, I wouldn’t be very much surprised if the president of the U.S. would have a good amount of support from Cape Bretoners given his ethnicity, where he and his family are from and his kind of pragmatic approach about the workers first,” he said.

Karaphillis said he didn’t think many people in Sydney knew or cared about Marlowe’s political affiliation. Clearly, their focus is on the employment he’s secured.

On Jan. 18, Marlowe was on his second and most recent trip to Canada for an official ribbon-cutting ceremony at the call centre. Marlowe told the hundreds of employees gathered at the event that he would meet them all at the local legion after — and the tab was on him.

But first, the operation’s vice-president offered gifts to Marlowe and his wife on behalf of the employees. She received a tartan scarf; he got a framed photo of The Big Fiddle, an iconic sculpture in downtown Sydney that stands almost 20 metres tall. Marlowe thanked the crowd, though he called it “unnecessary.”

After all, they’d be back on the phones for him when the ceremony was done.

With files from Haley Ryan and The Canadian Press

Taryn Grant is a Halifax-based reporter focusing on education. Follow her on Twitter: @tarynalgrant

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